My mom calls me Sal the Fish

Rhodesia. I’m five years old, my bathing suit a red nylon frilly pair of trunks. My mom, so scared of water that she can’t even soak in a bath and thus incapable of rescuing us if the need arises, enlists her scuba-diving boyfriend, every inch the Jonny Weissmuller, to teach us how to swim. Or To Teach Us How Not To Drown. He grabs me by the wrists, holds me for a moment above the deep end, and then lets go. My first swim.

I’m nine years old. My sisters and I spend our days on the beach in Durban, where the sand is too hot to walk on but the sea is cool and rough. I’m paddling out with a huge polystyrene makeshift surfboard. The wind catches and I’m blown further and further from the beach. Someone, I don’t remember who, is dispatched to rescue me.

Scotland. I’m a pale and strawberry blonde fourteen years old, and my big sis and I spend our weekends at the ‘Institute’, a large concrete pool where condensation drips from the ceiling and teenage boys hurl themselves off the 5m board. We pretend we’re French: bikini-clad we sit on the edge of the pool disdainfully trailing toes in the water.

I get older and find myself doing other sports less and swimming more. I move to London for work and seek out pools as comforting spaces. The water embraces me. On land I feel oddly adrift, stranded. I swim more and more. Pools. Lidos. Lakes. Seas. Rivers. I consume it all, greedily, relentlessly.

And without realising it’s happened, I somewhere stop being someone who swims, and become a Swimmer.